Wedgwood Museum: At risk

We are fairly certain that the late Robert Maxwell never met the even later Josiah Wedgwood, but Cap’n Bob’s nefarious legacy is now being keenly felt by Wedgwood’s descendants. For it was in the aftermath of Maxwell’s plundering of the Mirror Group that the Pension Protection Fund was established to compensate pensioners in the wake of insolvency. And now this legislation is being used to asset-strip one of the great museums of England.

On the southern edge of Stoke-on-Trent stands the Wedgwood Museum, dedicated to ‘The People Who Have Made Objects of Great Beauty from the Soils of Staffordshire’. A museum that in 2009 won the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries, with judges praising it as a ‘brilliant snapshot’ highlighting the marriage of art, design, manufacturing and commerce.

Its origins can be traced back to Wedgwood himself who in 1774 wrote of how ‘I have often wish’d I had saved a single specimen of all the new articles I have made, and would now give twenty times the original value for such a collection.